


Weolcan

by imperfectkreis



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Drug Use, Drug Withdrawal, F/F, Hallucinations, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-25 20:44:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16205318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperfectkreis/pseuds/imperfectkreis
Summary: A jointed doll with a soft face, thin limbs and a pretty voice. Like bells, he says, like an angel. None of this would have been possible without her, without his Faith. Though she knows she is not the first to bear the name, nor the second.(For Hope County Gothic 2018; Week 1, The Project at Eden’s Gate)





	Weolcan

He comes to the valley in her nineteenth year. By her twentieth, she belongs to him. 

A jointed doll with a soft face, thin limbs and a pretty voice. Like bells, he says, like an angel. None of this would have been possible without her, without his Faith. Though she knows she is not the first to bear the name, nor the second. She will lie, sometime later, when the deputy has their hands at her throat, and say she was only seventeen, when she was first gassed with the Bliss. When she was first told in sticky-sweet tones that she should forget the name Rachel Jessop. Oh, she will lie about many other things in between. But only because she wants to survive.

But, in Rachel’s nineteenth year, Tracey tells her not to go, the corners of her dark eyes glassy-wet, narrowed slightly with concern. Rachel waits to see if she will cry, panicked laughter bubbling inside her own ribcage like butterflies, shredding their wings between her bones. Because, once, when they were very small, Tracey said she loved her. Then, when they were a little older, she all but forgot Rachel‘s name. Rachel doesn’t know why she’s standing on her parents’ porch at the conservatory now, hair hidden by her hooded sweatshirt, beat up sneakers on her feet.

“If you go, I’ll go too,” Tracey says with a sort of doughy kindness, unprompted and unwanted. A pity that Rachel cannot stand.

Rachel hisses, “No,” because Eden’s Gate is meant to be her sanctuary, her escape from this. A big, empty house, parents never home. Her classmates with knives underneath their tongues. The vials that she scores behind the gas station in the dwindling hours of the evening with the money left over from her trust, before she’s too scared to go outside again in the eerie waning light. 

Where was Tracey then? What good can she possibly be now?

“I’m coming,” Tracey insists, and only then does Rachel register that she already has a backpack swung over her shoulder. The burgundy paint on her short-cut nails chipped around the edges. She grips the strap tightly, the soft scrape of her fingers loud against the nylon. “I already talked to that woman...Jan? Jean?”

“Jean,” Rachel repeats, the name heavy and metallic in her mouth. Rachel does not know her well. Only that she sits in the front pew to listen to Father speak. That she has pretty green eyes and long dark hair. That she is not surprised that Jean could convince Tracey to join the Project. And it’s very clear now that Tracey’s insistence has very little at all to do with Rachel.

The monarchs in her chest start to flap again. And Rachel grabs the wooden railing on her parents’ porch, trying to tip her head over the side to vomit, to let the demons out. Father says that she can be pure again. If only she can trust.

But instead, she chokes bile over her own hand, sticky and warm and putrid. Snatching her hand back, she watches as the sick rolls off her skin, hitting the deck planks around her bare feet. Tracey rang the bell before she finished getting dressed.

Tracey scrunches her nose at the sight, but says nothing more. The silence between them hangs heavy, even as Rachel tries to clean her hands in the already-soiled fabric of her dress. She is not yet clean.

“They’ll be here for me soon,” Rachel says, “I’ll tell them not to let you inside the truck…”

Tracey shrugs, turning her head just slightly as they both hear the truck coming up the Jessops’ drive. “They won’t stop me. You can’t stop me,” her voice is barely above a whisper now, breaking up around the edges, as the Bliss creeps back in. Swallows Tracey up as the engine noise grows closer, the rumble of tires in the gravel shifting, contorting back into the quiet, humming groan of the Angels, docile under Faith’s command.

Faith weaves her way between the Angels as they toil, shovels in their hands as they methodically work the fields. The leather muzzles hide their faces, keep them from biting back, even as the Bliss snaps around their bones, sapping what remains of the men and women they were before. Faith knows well that the cloud dulls their senses, but not their teeth.

She cannot feel the way the ground gives beneath her feet. At least not anymore. Her soles are dry and cracked, but no longer bleed, now that she is the vessel she was meant to be. Threading her way between the flowers, Faith tries to forget, to force her eyes away, prevent herself from searching for the features of her friend.

As she counts the Angels out, one, two, three, four, she never finds Tracey among their number. Faith wants to believe that she would remember Tracey’s face, the expression written across her beautiful features, in the moment that she ascended.

Good, she thinks, good, when she can conjure no such memory, while the flowers deposit their pollen on her dress.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are always apppreciated. You can find me on [tumblr](http://imperfectkreis.tumblr.com)


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